A Fake Facebook Wedding

During my junior year of college, I was friendly with a group of people who had all known each other since grade school. One member of this crowd was a guy named Tim. Growing up, Tim had always been the brain of the group, but, by the time I met him, he’d dropped out of college and was living by himself and working the night shift at a FedEx shipping center. He was stuck in one of those valleys of depression. Tim didn’t come around very often, but he was an instantly endearing person, and people were happy to see him. One day, out of the blue, Tim sent a long Facebook message to about a dozen of his friends. It started with a general apology. He was sorry for his cynicism. He had never believed in love, and he’d been snide and dismissive about his friends’ relationships. But deep down, he had actually been jealous. He saw that now, because, finally, it had happened to him. He was in love. In fact, he was engaged.

The relationship was unusual, and he’d been embarrassed to tell his friends about it. His new fiancée was Ukrainian, and living in Ukraine. She was deaf, so he’d only “spoken” to her via chat. But she was planning to come to the U.S. to visit her sister, an exchange student in Indiana, and the wedding date was set for next month. He changed his Facebook status to “Engaged” and posted a screenshot of a chat where he'd said, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?” and she replied, “Yes!!!” Soon, we got friend requests from the fiancée, Prila, who had just joined Facebook. She and her sister were posting on her wall about the upcoming visit.

Tim’s message was sent on April 1st, so we all assumed it was a joke. But when no retraction came in the following days and Tim started making wedding plans, we realized that the engagement was real, and that Tim was determined to go through with it. Facebook messages and phone calls flew around, working out the particulars of food and clothes and timing. A handful of Tim’s female friends (myself included) were asked to be bridesmaids. Tim’s best male friend, dubious but dutiful, began arranging a blowout bachelor’s party.

I saw Tim once during his engagement and grilled him to make sure this wasn’t a hoax. I wanted to see if he would slip up and contradict himself, but everything fit together. I tried to get him to reconsider, asking if he’d thought of the communication barrier, or the possibility that this woman was marrying him for a visa, or as part of some other scam. He said he knew that he and Prila would face enormous challenges—he wasn’t fooling himself about that—but they loved each other. He cared about her more than he knew it was possible to care about anything.

No one had seen much of Tim in the past few weeks. Independently, everyone had reached the conclusion that Tim was probably making a horrible mistake, but nobody felt that it was her place to put her foot down. But, with strength in numbers, we started wondering if we ought to be standing athwart the tide of Tim’s love. By the time we tumbled into the car in our sort-of-matching dresses, we had reached a fever pitch, conjuring visions of objection, confrontation, and mass exodus.

Just before we arrived, we got a call from one of the groomsmen. Our altar-side intervention wouldn’t be necessary, because Tim and Prila weren’t at the chapel. We pulled into the parking lot. All Tim’s friends were standing around in suits and dresses, looking confused and very angry. Somebody else was getting married inside.

Tim had made the whole thing up. Prila Yosfalda (almost a scramble, now so obviously, of “April Fool’s Day”) had never existed. The Facebook profile, the screenshots, the thorough backstory, and the life-changing love were purely Tim’s inventions. Now Tim was at his house, setting up a mock-wedding reception where, he thought, we’d come to celebrate our participation in the best April Fool’s prank ever.

Tim had pictured himself, he told me later, orchestrating a grand reunion where his friends would gather in appreciation of his hilarious cunning. Although he didn’t realize it until later, he was partially motivated by a desire to get back at us for moving on with our lives while his had gotten stuck. He got caught up in a vision of himself, no longer the one left behind, reasserted as the funniest guy in the world.

But no one wanted to go to Tim’s party. Some people said they never wanted to see Tim again. The angriest members of the wedding party went straight home. Everyone else went to lunch, where they elaborated on their belief in Tim’s worthlessness and probable insanity.

We all know that there are fake people on the Internet, just as we know that there are e-mail scammers, sexual predators, and virus authors, and what we envision are reptilian-looking loners sitting in basements, growing sallow by the blue light of their monitors. But maybe we should be picturing Manti Te’o, or the sweet-faced woman at the end of “Catfish.” We’re on guard against Ukrainian scammers being manipulative and mercenary when what we should be concerned about is Tim being lonely, resentful, reckless, and attention starved.

When we talk about the “dark side” of the Internet, we’re usually talking about criminal deception, or sometimes about porn, but what about the time we spend refreshing our inboxes like lab mice hoping for a pellet, or the vast unacknowledged expanses where we let our brains go stupid and set them free to graze on things like “The Ultimate Girls Fail Compilation 2012,” which currently has more than sixty-six million views on YouTube, but none of the buzz and analysis that follows “legitimate” viral videos? The Internet is perhaps the closest thing we’ll ever have to the ring of Gyges—the invisibility charm that allows its wearer to be alone while having access to the outside world—which Plato posited as the truest test of how a person will act when freed from accountability or restraint. We might not be doing anything evil, but we’re not doing anything we want the world to see.

Events like the Te’o hoax, the “Catfish” scam, and Tim’s wedding suggest psychosis. But consider how crazy anyone would look if our online lives were laid bare. In one tab we craft a perfectly pithy tweet, and in the next tab, we Google our exes. The Internet is both a stage for manicured social performances and a repository for our raw insecurities, blemishes, and ignorance. Nothing reveals more than a search history, that manic mental ticker tape where our intellectual pursuits and our cosmopolitan interests accompany such things as the words that we don’t know how to spell, the sexual terms we don’t understand, and the diseases we think we might have.

Stories about fake girlfriends and staged weddings may be the result of punctures in the already thin membrane that separates the real world from the lives that we lead online. In Tim’s case, he imagined a world where the entropy that was pulling him downward would be reversed by a major life event. Then he made that world materialize on his browser and let it bleed into reality. For Te’o, whether he was the schemer or the victim—whether he was constructing a fantasy life for the world to behold, or thought the Internet had dropped the undemanding girl of his dreams on his doorstep—he used the everyday mechanisms of online life to enact a private wish, a wish that started parading around as a public fact and demanding the emotional legitimacy of truth.

Mark Zuckerberg, for all of his supposed ham-handed obliviousness to the way people think and feel, is attuned to the gap we straddle between performance and secrecy. His vision of a radically transparent society built on open information sharing (on Facebook) is based on the idea that we should all just acknowledge and embrace all the disparate ways we act online, effectively eliminating the distinction between private action and performance. The way to avoid doing anything you’re ashamed of, the argument goes, is not to be ashamed of anything you do. But achieving radical transparency would require more than an overhaul of our online habits; it would require an overhaul of the human character. A radically transparent world would have to be made up of individuals so luxuriously comfortable in their own skins that they would be unbearably annoying. Privacy protects us from surveillance and coercion, and offers the basic human need to be alone with ourselves.

The fallout from Tim’s wedding was severe. No one would talk to him for several months. Gradually, apologies were made and expenses reimbursed, and people stopped swearing bitterly at the mention of his name. But something had been ruptured. Maybe it was due to the loss of trust, or the reëvaluation of character. Or maybe it was the embarrassment of discovering that we’d been co-opted as a character in somebody’s fantasy world. Whatever the case, there were friendships that had lasted since the third grade that never quite came back to life after the wedding.

I hadn’t known Tim for many years, so I didn’t feel as betrayed, but I didn’t put much energy into the friendship from then on, and we lost touch. I haven’t talked to Tim in years. The last I heard (which was a long time ago), he had a (real) girlfriend, a job that interested him, and some new friends. While writing this, I went to Facebook to find the original wedding invitation, but it seems to be gone. I also looked for Tim, but he’s no longer on Facebook. He’s vanished.